


Feed Me to the Years

by DasWarSchonKaputt



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bisexual Female Character, F/M, Female Dean Winchester, Genderswap, i apologise in advance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 14:47:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3814444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DasWarSchonKaputt/pseuds/DasWarSchonKaputt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“My name is Deanna Winchester. I go by Dean. I’m an Aquarius. I enjoy sunsets, long walks on the beach and flexible sexual partners. Say, do you do yoga?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feed Me to the Years

**Author's Note:**

> For Chris, you enabling bastard.
> 
> Warnings for: rape/non-con references (nothing explicit), underage (both of them are 15, but it's not at all graphic), self-righteous adolescent fury, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and character death. But you know, this is Supernatural.

**i.**

At fifteen, Deanna is jailbait.

She’s self-aware, flat-chested jailbait, but jailbait all the same. She notices it in the way that men’s eyes stick to her when she scrapes her father off the floors of bars, in the subtle ways that her body develops. And, after a blushing conversation with a sex-worker (Cindy is the name she gave to clients, but she told Deanna to call her Nina) on the steps outside their motel room, Deanna is more than aware what this means.

It means she has to act.

She picks her target out at the next high school she attends for more than a week. His name is Eric and he is one of the very few she never forgets.

Eric is dorky and self-conscious – the kind of kid who will doubtlessly make puberty his bitch in a couple of years – and all too easy to manipulate into bed. He looks at her like she’s something more than this, more than an easy lay, more than a drifter with a pretty face. It’s kind of cute and it’s also why she chooses him.

Afterwards, collapsed against her chest, gasping and overwhelmed, he asks, “Why me?”

Deanna’s been asking herself that question all her life.

This isn’t a teen movie, though. Deanna is not here to play into Eric’s self-esteem issues. She is not his to know and her vulnerability is not a prize to be won. She says, “Why not?”

She says, “Why not?” because it’s the only answer she’s come to that makes any sense. She says, “Why not?” because it feels nice – too nice – to lie in his arms and count his heartbeats. She says, “Why not?” because it is so much better to cast aside your happily ever after instead of having it ripped away.

Eric’s expression sours. For a moment, she wants to take it all back.

“Because I like you,” she should have said. “Because you read Hemmingway for fun, and you wear sweater vests, and you’re the polar opposite of everything I am.”

She should have said, “Because this way I get to choose.”

Instead, she says, “Why not?” and pushes away from his bare chest. His mouth twists, but she pays no attention to it.

Deanna doesn’t owe him anything. He got her body, fine, but she will tear herself to shreds before she trusts him with her truths.

“Pass my shirt?” she asks.

He throws it at her.

* * *

 

Deanna Winchester is sixteen when she hacks her hair off in a motel bathroom with nail scissors. The end result is choppy and uneven, but just neat enough that it looks like a fashion statement. She briefly considers going over it with an electric razor, but her hand curls in on itself before she can pick the device up.

After she emerges, she can feel Sammy’s eyes on her and she thinks, _he knows._ Sam never says anything, though; Winchesters are made of sterner stuff than that.

Stoicism is in their genetics.

Curled under the bedcovers that night, it’s the first time in nearly eight months that Deanna has thought of Eric. Despite how it ended between them – Deanna baiting, because she never could quite help herself, and an angry, self-righteous scream of _slut_ across a crowded hallway – she is so utterly grateful to him. Eric, in all his glasses and sweater vests and tortured-poet looks, _let her choose._

“It’s the times you _choose_ that matter, ‘kay?” Nina had said. Irrationally, Deanna misses her.

* * *

 

Dad stares at her short hair like he’s in mourning. She doesn’t know what it means.

No, that’s a lie.

Deanna knows exactly what it means, knows that in spite of her rapidly darkening hair and her fuck-the-world attitude, she looks more and more like Mom as each day passes. She’s taken the last reminder Dad had of Mom, and she’s left it strewn over their motel room’s bathroom floor.

Fuck that.

Fuck him for thinking he had any right to her looks and fuck Mom too for being the one ghost she can’t salt and burn. She sits in silence in the passenger seat of the Impala, deliberately motionless, until she’s lost count of the miles in her head.

* * *

It’s three months after she cut her hair short and kept it short, that she’s arrested. She’s still angry, at herself and at the cops, and at the goddamned store clerk who called her out and fucking started this shit.

 _Peanut butter and bread._ All this fucking mess over peanut butter and bread.

She gives the arresting officer a black-eye. It’s the perfect way to taunt him, she knows, and she takes pleasure in niggling at his masculinity. _Look at you_ , she pushes his way with a smirk. _Bested by a skinny teenage girl._

Dad tells the police to let her rot. She guesses that he’s finally sick of her passive aggressive attitude. That, or he was stone-cold drunk when they called.

They send her to a convent instead of to county, and as Officer Green drops her off, she makes sure to sneer at him. “Put some ice on that eye,” she advises without a single shred of insincerity. “It looks pretty painful.”

The nun waiting for her – Sister Mary, after Mary Magdalene, not the virgin one – raises her eyebrows. “I’m not certain that was the wisest course of action,” she states dryly.

“Oh yeah, why?”

Sister Mary looks down at Deanna’s wrists – still handcuffed together – and then out, through the window at the police cruiser slowly pulling away.

Oh. That.

Sister Mary sighs. Then she crouches down and _picks the lock_. After she’s done (and Deanna’s done gaping at her), she holds up the handcuffs and says, “I’m sure one of the older girls can find a use for these.”

If Deanna’s eyes could go any wider, they would probably be popping out of their sockets.

Sister Mary smiles gently at her. “Your father give you those bruises?” she asks, nodding at the dark marks around her wrists.

Deanna shrugs, carefully nonchalant. “Would you believe me if I told you it was a werewolf?” she asks.

The look on Sister Mary’s face says no, no she wouldn’t. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

* * *

Deanna never tells Sister Mary the reason that she keeps her hair short, but she thinks that the nun has to know. Sister Mary has to know because she takes Deanna to the doctor’s for STD testing. She has to know because she mentions once, all to casually, that baptism is about cleansing oneself – soul and mind and body – and she asks if it’s something Deanna wants.

Deanna never does get baptised. It’s actually sort of ironic it’s her stay at the convent that finally persuades Deanna that God doesn’t exist – and if he does, he’s not worth believing in.

Deanna believes in people. She believes in Sister Mary, and she’s starting to believe in herself.

* * *

In a round-about way, Sister Mary is the reason that Deanna meets Robin.

Because the convent requires her to at least uphold the façade that she’s a practising Christian, Deanna – after weeks of artful dodging and avoidance – ends up actually having to attend one of the church’s Sunday services. She ends up sandwiched between an old lady with a pungent scent – who tuts disapprovingly at Deanna’s hair – and the preacher’s daughter, Robin.

Robin is small and slight and harmlessly – endearingly – rebellious. She takes one look at Deanna and sees a kindred spirit, someone else desperately clawing at the mould they’ve been placed in, trying to break free.

“I want to be a photographer,” Robin tells Deanna. “See the world, travel everywhere, you know?”

Deanna has grown tired of travelling, but she nods anyway. She isn’t expecting Robin to kiss her. She isn’t expecting to like it, either.

Robin is the first girl, the first love, the first in a long string of fuck-ups. They kiss where no-one can see, curl around each other in Deanna’s bed, swap secrets. Deanna falls hard and fast and she knows it can never last.

She loves Robin, but when it comes down to it, when she has to choose between Robin and Sam – she picks Sam. She always picks Sam.

Deanna leaves the day after Robin said that she loved her. They never had sex.

* * *

**ii.**

There’s a couple of weeks, just after her seventeenth birthday, that Deanna spends terrified. She can’t stop her hand twitching towards her stomach, dread turning in her gut as she counts the days. She’s _late._

The first pregnancy test comes back positive. She spends half an hour hyperventilating in a convenience store bathroom, breaths coming too much and then too little, before she manages to talk herself back into calmness.

She can’t be pregnant. She _can’t._ Oh, God, what will Dad say? What will Sammy say? What will she have to _do_ with it?

That night, she uses one of her many fake IDs to gain access to a bar. She pretends to drink beer while she fleeces some college kids out of five hundred bucks, and only hands four hundred over to her father.

She sneaks down to the convenience store and buys as many tests as she can afford. Even though she gets a raised eyebrow from the acne-ridden store clerk, and has to drink about two litres of water for there to be enough pee to take them all, it’s worth it when they come back negative, negative, and negative.

For nearly six months afterwards, Deanna sleeps exclusively with girls.

* * *

Lisa is fun and bendy and never asks Deanna for more than she can give. If circumstances were different, Deanna would probably fall in love with her.

She leaves before that’s a pressing danger.

* * *

On New Year’s Day, 2000, three weeks before she turns twenty-one, she’s enjoying a solitary beer outside a bar when she is cornered by four men, drunk off their faces. For a second, she’s sixteen again, small and quick, with no muscle mass, and there is a weight pressing her down—

And then she’s not there anymore. She’s twenty years-old, and it’s the start of a new millennium, and Deanna Winchester hunts monsters.

She returns to their motel room with the skin scraped off her knuckles, face flushed and clothes messed. Sam looks at her, concerned and confused, but she can’t help it. She feels the sting of her busted knuckles and the dying shreds of adrenaline and she laughs, and she laughs, and she laughs.

She takes a shower that night, and it feels like a baptism.

* * *

Three weeks later and her hair’s a little longer, her smiles a little more genuine. Dad takes her out to buy her her first ‘legal’ drink – the fact that it’s still bought with a fake ID doesn’t seem to mean much to either of them – and as they sit under the dimmed lighting of the bar, and Dad talks about their latest case, it’s good.

It’s the first time in a long time that Deanna’s felt like she’s more than just a younger Mary Winchester to her father.

At the end of the evening, Dad notes, “You’re growing your hair out.” It’s said without inflection.

Deanna shrugs.

Dad places a large hand on her shoulder. “It looks good, kiddo,” he says.

And yeah, maybe it does.

* * *

Deanna’s hair is chin-length, kept in a cute bob, when Sam leaves for Stanford.

She goes out and gets hammered at the nearest bar. She has flickering memories of flirting over pool, taking a guy for everything he had only to end up making out with him in a toilet stall. There’s a warm, male body lying in bed beside her the next morning, and it hits her suddenly that Ross, or Ronald, or Ralph, or Rob, or whatever – he’s the first guy she’s slept with in nearly five years.

“It’s the ones you _choose_ that matter, ‘kay?” said Nina, all those years ago, and Deanna wants her here. She wants to ask, _What if I fuck up? What if I choose the wrong ones? What do I do now?_

She’s stood in Rafe’s bathroom, staring at her reflection, and she has ruined everything. She snaps her hand back and she smashes it into the mirror. There’s blood and broken glass, and Rafe is behind her, holding her back before she can throw herself forward again.

He sits her on the toilet. Bandages her hand. “What can I do to help?” he asks.

Sometimes she misses things in the way people speak. How ‘what can I do to help’ is so very different to ‘can I do anything to help’. She doesn’t miss it here.

“Cut my hair,” she says, and he nods.

Eric. Robin. Lisa. Rafe. She doesn’t ever forget him. She wonders what the hell a guy like him was doing playing pool at a bar.

* * *

When she returns to Dad and to the Impala, he spots her newly cut hair immediately.

From the look on his face, the growing realisation and horror, she can tell that he’s finally figured it out. He says nothing, though, doesn’t even think of treating her differently. She can’t decide if she loves him or hates him for it.

* * *

It takes all of one hour for Deanna to fall in love with Cassie Robinson, and she swears in that time that she won’t let her go.

It doesn’t even last a month.

On day twenty-nine, Deanna sits down with Cassie in her cramped bedroom and she tells her everything – hunting, that she’s not out to her family yet, the day when she was sixteen and terrified and all she could do was shower obsessively and cut her hair. She’s on the verge of breaking down by the end of it; she feels like she’s just ripped open her chest and invited Cassie to put her hands over her lungs and heart.

Deanna still doesn’t know which secret it was that made Cassie break up with her.

* * *

She fucks a guy named Caspar with dark hair and Cassie’s skin-tone. She slips out before he wakes up and spends thirty minutes crying in the motel lobby.

Deanna tells herself she won’t do it again, but a week later, she’s in bed with Lucas, and then again, the week after that, with Niall, and then with Viren, and she just… doesn’t stop.

* * *

Four months.

Four months of nameless, faceless men. Four months of hair-trigger awakenings and walks of shame across motel hallways. Four months and Deanna has finally realised that she doesn’t have any hair left to shear off.

She’s tired, just—tired.

Of reinventing herself. Of strangers. Of strange beds. Of applying makeup like it’s armour, knowing that the only thing it does is hide bruises from her dad.

She feels like maybe her skin should be peeling itself off, like she should somehow have more to show from all of this than coiling disgust and contraceptive pills.

Deanna finds the number in her contacts easily enough and she dials it on instinct, without really thinking. It’s a habit from another time, from when she and Sam only had each other, and she feels so shamefully weak that she’s the one to break the silence.

Deanna doesn’t recognise the voice that picks it up. “ _Sam Winchester’s phone – can I help?_ ”

She forces herself to swallow. “Hey,” she says, hating the way that the word feels like a milestone as she scrapes it out of her throat. “Can I speak to Sam please?”

“ _Can I ask who’s calling?_ ”

“Please,” Deanna whispers. “Please, just put Sam on.”

There’s a long, drawn out, “ _Okay_ ,” and then a bit of shuffling on the other end before she hears Sam’s hand close around the handset.

“ _Hi, who is this?_ ”

Deanna’s voice catches in her throat. God, he sounds exactly the same.

“ _Hello?_ ” Sam moves away from the handset, and Deanna can hear his muffled conversation with the other voice.

“ _Who was it?_ ”

“ _Some chick, I dunno._ ”

“ _Some chick—what did she say?_ ”

“ _Just asked to speak to you_.”

And then Sam’s voice is back, speaking straight down the line. “ _Deanna, is that you?_ ”

“ _Who the fuck is Deanna?_ ”

“ _Shut up, Brady._ ” And then again, “ _Deanna, what’s wrong? Deanna?_ ”

Deanna hangs up.

* * *

Deanna stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, caressing her fingers over Mirror Deanna’s cheekbones. She remembers briefly that she was named after another Deanna – Deanna Campbell, her grandmother – and wonders what the Campbell Matriarch would think of all this.

 **Deanna Winchester** , she writes in the steam over her reflection.

 **Deanna** , she starts again, but stops.

_So hot, Deanna, so—fuck—oh my God—_

_God, I love you, Deanna._

Deanna. Deanna. Deanna.

_You want it, don’t you, Deanna? Of course you do, you dirty—_

Deanna wipes her hand through the steam-crisp words. She waits for the steam to build up again, and then she writes, more clearly this time, **Dean** _._

**Dean Winchester** _._

For a superhero origin story, it’s kind of pathetic, but this is where it all begins.

* * *

**iii.**

It’s been four years since Dean last saw Sam face-to-face and she’s looming over him, her arm pressed against his jugular. “You’re out of practice,” she tells him, and is more than prepared for the sudden movement of limbs that ends with her face-down on his tiled floor. “Or not,” she concedes.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Sam asks, offering her a hand and heaving her off the floor.

Dean brushes herself down. “Well, I was looking for a beer…” She breaks off at Sam’s unimpressed look. “We’ve got to talk.”

“You think of calling?” Sam asks, but they both know he wouldn’t have picked up. Before either of them can say anything else, the light flips on and _holy shit_ , is that Sam’s _girlfriend_?

“Sam?” Hottie McBlonde asks.

Sam whirls around. “Jess,” he says. “Hey. Deanna,” he turns back to Dean, “this is my girlfriend, Jessica.”

‘Jess’ smiles politely at Dean. “You mean like your sister, Deanna?”

Dean grins. “Dean,” she says, sticking her hand out to Jess, and doesn’t _that_ get a charged look from Sam. “And can I just say that you are _completely_ out of my brother’s league.” She accompanies the words with a leer, because she knows it will piss Sam off, and because it makes Jess uncomfortable. Out of the corner of her eye, Dean watches Sam’s jaw tighten as Jess pulls down on the hem of her Smurfs T-shirt.

Dean just grins, unrepentant and easy.

“Let me just go put something on,” Jess says, and Dean watches her flee the kitchen, satisfied.

Sam’s got this weird constipated look on his face when Dean turns back to him.

“What?” she demands.

Sam shakes his head. “Nothing, just—you cut your hair.”

Fuck. Dean had forgotten just how perceptive her brother was. She shrugs. “Easier to manage,” she deflects. “C’mon, Sammy, we’ve got to talk.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, Deanna,” Sam replies. “It’s only been, what? Two years? I’m not your idiot kid brother, Deanna. What’s going on?”

Dean shifts. “Dad’s on a hunting trip,” she says. “And he’s missed his last three check-ins.”

* * *

Three days later and Dad is still missing, but Sam’s apartment is a raging inferno against the dark skyline. Dean sits close to Sam, keeps him pressed close into her side and tries not to think about how it had felt to drag her brother out of that building. Neither of them say anything, but they’re both acutely aware of the fact that it’s been twenty-two years to the day since their mother burned.

“We’ve got work to do,” Sam says.

Dean wanted her brother back, but not like this. Never like this.

* * *

Jess’s funeral is exactly one week later. Dean digs out one of her black pantsuits and picks a cheap suit up for Sam. She loads him into the car and drives the short distance from their motel to the church, and she stays by his side throughout the entire affair.

She can feel the stares from Sam’s Stanford buddies, can feel the questions, the ‘so this is the infamous Deanna’s, but she doesn’t care. It’s been over two decades since she was last at a funeral for any reason other than a case and stood here, it suddenly hits her just how much Jess looked like Mom.

Blond hair, kind smile, sort of dorky – she was more like Mary Winchester than Dean.

She doesn’t say anything when Sam cries.

She’s not sure what she’s supposed to.

* * *

They slip into a routine after that. They drive around and they hunt and Dean sleeps with anything that moves, all the while Sam disapproves gently from the side-lines. A part of Dean misses the old days, when Sam didn’t talk to her for months and months on end, because at least then he never tried to change her.

Each time she introduces herself as Dean, she can feel his eyes on her, and can taste the unspoken question in the air.

They find Dad, only to lose him again. It’s a pattern that refuses to end, until it does.

Then Dean’s waking up in hospital, a medical miracle, and Dad has sold his soul. He sold his soul for _Dean._ She can’t figure out if he did it because he couldn’t bear to live and lose her or if he just couldn’t bear to live. Either way, he’s dead and there’s an empty whole in her that she didn’t know could be carved out.

It’s the first time in a long time that Sam’s the one to comfort her.

* * *

She meets Jo when she’s still whirling and, God, she wishes she could just…

She can’t.

Jo has long blonde hair and soft eyes. She takes names and gives ‘em hell, but she’s not hardened and she’s not bitter. She’s a young Deanna Winchester, almost daring the world to do her wrong. Dean refuses to be the one to take that away. A little idealism is good for this barren, shitty reality.

But sometimes, sometimes, crowded over a beer at the Roadhouse, Dean looks up and meets Jo’s eye. Jo smiles at her, and in that flash of teeth there are a thousand invitations, a thousand ‘we could happen’s, and Dean lets herself want. She won’t ever let it go further than that, but she could.

She could.

* * *

It’s after the djinn, after the picture perfect suburban life with Mom alive and her steady boyfriend, Cameron, that Sam cracks. They’re somewhere in between a vast expanse of state lines, backed by the rumble of the Impala’s heavy motor, and Sam turns to her. “Was it you?” he asks.

“Was what me?” Dean shoots back distractedly.

Sam won’t meet her gaze. “It’s a long shot, but a few years back, I got this call. I just—was it you?”

Dean’s silent for a long time. “That is a long shot,” she eventually says. “It’s…”

“You shouldn’t have hung up,” Sam cuts in. “You don’t have to tell me anything now, Deanna, but—you shouldn’t have hung up.”

Dean shrugs. She turns back to the road. “Maybe.”

She still had short hair in the dream. All the actualities and potentialities in the world couldn’t do a damned thing about that.

* * *

Sam dies and Dean…

Dean is selfish.

Not many people see it, all the ways she pulls things to herself and refuses to let go. They just see the girl who dropped out of high school, or the girl who got arrested for stealing food, or the girl who has sold everything and anything she has for her younger brother – and they don’t get it. Dean’s selfish, but she does it in selfless ways.

So here’s how it works: Dean can’t live without Sam. And he’s _dead_ , and suddenly, her soul doesn’t seem like that big a price to pay to get him back.

(Her soul isn’t the only price, she’ll find out later, and she will want to thrust this fact up into the light. Selling her soul is a selfish move, because even knowing what she knows then, she’d still do it. For Sam.)

She gets one year and she has no intention of trying to survive longer.

* * *

May 2nd 2008 is a Friday. Dean doesn’t know why this fact sticks with her as she’s pulled down to hell, but it does. Dying is painful, but it’s quick, and briefly, stupidly, Dean wonders just how much worse death can be than life.

As always, she’s wrong. She’s wrong for an eternity in years. She’s just wrong.

Hell came for Dean on a Friday. Salvation, on a Thursday.

* * *

**iv.**

The first time Alastair offers her the knife, it’s easy to answer, “No.” The second, as well. The third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh…

She doesn’t remember how many times she clings to the word _no_ before she finally says, “Yes.” She feels like she should.

* * *

Life is sharp. Hell was sharp too, but life, the earth… it’s different. Dean claws her way out of her coffin, hands breaking through soil and grass, and she pulls her body up, out of the darkness and into the light. Maybe it’s supposed to be poetic, some sort of literary symmetry, but really, it’s just pretty fucking traumatic.

If she wasn’t certain that all her nightmares for the next few years were going to be preoccupied with what she did in hell, Dean’s pretty she sure she would dream about this too.

Her gravesite looks like a bomb hit. Flattened trees, widespread destruction – Dean sits at the centre of it all and wonders what went down here. What pulled her out of hell and did—this.

Dean stands, noticing the dirt-covered clothes that she was buried in. They’re not what she was wearing when she died, which means someone changed them.

She hopes it was Sam. The idea of anyone else… No. Dean hopes it was Sam.

She pulls the loose flannel shirt around her tighter and sets about walking.

* * *

It feels strange to stand in front of a mirror and scrutinise herself. The last time she did this, the room was filled with steam and she was writing a new name for herself over her reflection. _What have you done now, Dean Winchester_ , she thinks. _What have you done?_

All her old scars are gone. Even the piercing holes in her ears have been healed over; the only mark left on her body from before is her anti-possession tattoo.

She trails her hands absent-mindedly over her skin, tracing her contours and curves until she comes to her left shoulder. Burned onto the flesh, still tender, is a large handprint.

What the—

Dean looks up to check herself in the mirror, and stops.

Whoever did this, whoever brought her back, rebuilt this body, they regrew her hair. She stares openly at it, at the knotty mess cascading down her back, and she’s not sure what she wants to feel.

It feels like a second chance and Dean can’t fathom why the hell anyone would ever offer it to her.

* * *

Castiel.

Dean’s ears bleed.

Castiel.

Pamela’s eyes burn.

Castiel. Castiel. Castiel.

* * *

Dean has stopped and restarted and stopped and restarted and stopped and restarted – again and again, countless origin points dotted across her lifetime. She’s made of jagged edges, new beginnings and forced endings. Castiel is—something changes.

In that barn, surrounded by every protection sigil that Bobby has ever encountered, staring down an angel wearing a tax accountant wearing a trench-coat – something changes.

“I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition,” says Castiel, and Dean thinks _what the fuck._

“Who are you?” she demands.

“Castiel.”

“Yeah, I figured that much,” Dean spits. “I meant, _what_ are you?”

“I’m an Angel of the Lord,” Castiel says, and Dean thinks, _bullshit._

* * *

It’s not bullshit.

And that’s pretty fucking terrifying.

* * *

Angels are dicks, but apparently that’s old news. Her mother was a hunter, and that’s pretty new. Mary Winchester is a tiny blonde, but from all appearances that only means that she’s concentrated badass.

Dean tells her dad – young and fresh-faced, charming and, God, so different to the man Dean remembers – that she’s Mary’s cousin from out of town, and he says, “I can see the resemblance.” The words are like a stab to the gut.

In the end, nothing changes.

Dean wants to scream and tear into Cas, but instead she just slumps.

He looks at her with something adjacent to sympathy. “I’m sorry, Deanna,” he says.

“No, you’re not.”

No, he’s not.

* * *

The first time Dean has sex again after hell, it’s with a handsome stranger at a bar. She doesn’t remember his name the next morning, not because she was drunk, but because she doesn’t think she ever asked for it. It’s a pleasant enough night to remember, a little slice of normal in amongst the ever-growing pile of crap that she and Sam have to face.

She slips out before he wakes up, and she feels… okay. Maybe not great, but okay.

She can work with okay.

* * *

“I would do anything for you not to have to do this, Deanna,” Cas says and it’s such a lie.

Alastair is the last person she ever wanted to see again, but he’s there and he’s everything that Dean has been desperately pushing out of her mind. She’s here to break him. She breaks herself instead.

She wants to die.

Hell, or heaven – Dean doesn’t care. She just wants it to be over. Cas is by her side as she lies in that hospital bed, and he tells her that it’s all true. She started all of this. She broke.

Castiel tilts his head at her. “You were broken, Deanna,” he corrects, as if that’s any better.

She can’t do this. She just can’t. “My name,” she scrapes out, “is Dean.”

Sleep takes her.

* * *

Zachariah is the next angel up the food-chain. He happens to also be a dick. Precisely no-one is surprised.

He sets Dean up in this other life to prove a point. Dee Smith is a high-flying editor at a _fashion magazine_ , of all places, and Sam is cast as the most muscular tech-support in the history of, well, _ever._ Together, they fight crime. Or ghosts. Whatever.

It’s whacked out, but what the hell. It came from Zachariah’s twisted mind, not Dean’s.

“You were always going to be a hunter, Dean,” Zachariah says triumphantly, and irrationally, Dean finds herself missing the way that Castiel’s mouth used to curve around the word _Deanna._

“Fuck you,” Dean says. Mostly she’s pissed about having her memories dicked about with by a douchebag with wings, but she’s also a little bit pissed that Zachariah’s fucking scheming means that she hasn’t eaten anything solid in a _week._

She’s going to go out and eat the biggest cheeseburger she can find and then she’s going to take off these fucking stilettos and _drive one of them into his skull._

Zachariah chuckles at her. “I like you, Dean,” he says.

The statement makes Dean want to throw up.

* * *

Jimmy Novak is… strange. He looks like Cas – no, Cas looks like him – but he’s different. More human. It makes something in Dean ache.

But Jimmy’s gone almost as soon as she met him.

Castiel walks forward. “I don’t serve you, Dean Winchester,” and then he’s gone. Just like that.

He called her Dean.

* * *

Zachariah tells her that she’s Michael’s vessel. Dean tells Zachariah that he can tell Michael to go fuck himself. This is her body and she is _done_ with letting other people own it, letting other people stake their claim on her. It’s _hers._

Zachariah sneers at her. “Oh, but it isn’t really, is it?” he snarls.

Dean levels a cold glare at him. “I want to speak to Cas,” she says. “Alone.”

Zachariah raises his eyebrows, but he leaves. Cas stands before her and he looks… sorry. Well, fuck that. He doesn’t get to be _sorry_. He can be fucking sorry when he’s dead. When they’re all dead because there is no other choice. There is just this.

“If there is _anything_ worth dying for, this is it,” she spits at him. He tries to turn away, but she won’t let him. “You spineless, soulless son of a bitch. You’re already dead.”

His entire frame freezes. “Deanna—” he says, and that’s when she knows she has him.

* * *

Sam chooses a demon over her.

Cas chooses her over heaven.

Everyone’s falling and it’s the apocalypse and she has no idea what the hell any of it means.

* * *

For a while, Dean can function with Sam.

She can look at her brother and she can quash the betrayal and the bitterness and she can just do her _goddamn job_. It’s okay. Dean can work with okay.

But then there’s War.

And Sam leaves.

And maybe they are better off apart.

* * *

Castiel is probably going to die, because Castiel is a fucking idiot who wants to capture and interrogate an _archangel._

“Again,” Cas cuts in. “I’m going to die _again._ ”

“Was that a…” Dean trails off. “Did you just guilt-trip me?”

“Did it work?”

“No.”

Yes. Damnit.

* * *

It’s Castiel’s last night on earth and the poor guy is going to die a virgin. After he blows it – pun not intended but in fact a happy coincidence – with the prostitute and they stumble out of the brothel, she leads him back to their room for the night. Castiel is still frowning when they get there, as if he can’t quite understand what this was all about.

He sits on the bed, perplexed, and Dean figures, well, she keeps her promises. She clambers on top of him and looks down at his face, still shadowed by confusion, and she grins. Bodies flush against each other, she leans down and she captures his lips with her own.

When she’s kissed people before, there’s always been a taste. Toothpaste, or garlic, or beer – usually beer. Castiel doesn’t taste like anything. He tastes like… saliva.

For a moment, Castiel is passive. He’s frozen beneath her, but then he’s surging upwards, and Dean thinks _yes_ , before his hands find a place on her shoulders and he pushes her away.

“I made my choices, Deanna,” Castiel says, and there it is, the righteous fury that lined his voice when he told Dean that he sacrificed everything for her. “Do not demean them by trying to pay me back like this.”

And what the hell can Dean say to that?

* * *

Dean’s beginning to think that Zachariah is dropping acid each time he pulls her away from her normal reality. “You guys are really desperate to get me to say yes, aren’t you?” Dean asks him as she drives.

There’s no reply. She turns slightly and _typical._ He’s gone.

The future is pretty bleak, but it’s a zombie apocalypse, so Dean thinks it’s entitled to its bleakness. Future Dean is an asshole, but she’s an asshole who’s trying to keep everyone alive. Dean can respect that.

The less said about Future Cas, the better.

“Please,” Future Dean says. “Please, I am begging you, say yes.”

Dean’s eyes scan the camp, and they catch. On Cas. Future Cas with his harems and his booze and pills.

Future Dean notices. “To an angel,” she muses, “falling is the ultimate sin.”

Dean turns back to herself. “Why are you telling me this?”

She doesn’t get an answer. She’s starting to think there’s a pattern here.

* * *

Zachariah snaps her out of it just after she’s seen Lucifer in Sam’s skin snap her future self’s neck. He’s smug and she’s determined to be contrary for no other reason than to piss him off.

She riles him up with ease and just when he’s ready to strike, ready to throw her into a never-ending loop of alternate futures, Castiel pulls her out.

He’s just standing there, same as ever, completely missing the point, and _oh._

_To an angel, falling is the ultimate sin._

“Don’t ever change,” she says. _Don’t ever think that I wasn’t worth it._

* * *

Gabriel’s a dick. Michael’s a dick. Anna is… slightly more complicated, but she loses her right to ‘angels I like’ status when she tries to kill Sam.

Dean’s beginning to wonder what God was thinking when he made them.

The same, she supposes, could be said for humanity.

* * *

The omens build. People die. Dean’s conviction grows weaker and weaker until she opens her eyes and she knows. She’s going to say yes to Michael.

Cas stops her before she can get very far. “I rebelled for _this_?” he demands, and he forces her up against the wall.

And then she’s sixteen again, and she’s helpless and afraid.

Dean is afraid.

She’s _afraid._

It cuts through the numbness in her gut and tangles up in her chest. For a second, she thinks that Castiel is going to punch her, but he stays still, breaths ragged and gaze impossibly hard.

She makes her choice. She surges forward and she crashes into him. It’s teeth against teeth and then he’s kissing her back. She can taste blood in her mouth and it’s…

It can never last.

* * *

Sam jumps into hell.

Everything else happens too, but Dean can’t process that yet. She can’t, she can’t, she can’t.

Sam jumps.

Dean hits the ground.

It ends.

* * *

Afterwards, Cas stands opposite her, too close, always too close, and he says that he will stay if she asks.

Dean wonders what it is about her that corrupts so absolutely, that she can take an Angel of the Lord and turn him into this – into this beautiful, damaged, human thing. Castiel would watch heaven burn to stay by her side. That’s—terrifying.

“That’s the reason I’m not going to ask, Cas,” she replies, and the words are as tired as she is. “But you can stay. If you want.”

“Angels aren’t supposed to want, Deanna,” Cas tells her.

Dean shrugs. “Maybe you are, but you guys just haven’t figured out how.”

He shakes his head, and it hits her.

“Cas,” the word forces its way out of her throat. “Before you leave.”

He tilts his head at her, and it’s such a human gesture, so unlike the Castiel she first knew that— _I love you._ She smiles and brushes her lips against his. “Don’t be a stranger, Cas.”

* * *

Castiel is gone.

Dean drives for miles and miles, until the Impala feels empty and her head is heavy with lack of sleep. She stops the car, kills the engine and gets out.

For the first time in a long time, Dean Winchester prays to God.

* * *

**v.**

Dean never thought she would see the day when churches would become anything more than a useful spot to stop in a hunt. The world sure showed her, though. God, the world showed her.

The last time she was here, she was sixteen. There was a preacher spewing vitriol about the absolution of sin and she spent the majority of his sermon sharing charged glances with his daughter across the congregation. Dean was lost then too.

Now, she sits in the pews and listens to the echoes of that old sermon, and she stares up at the crucifix at the front of the church.

“For someone who’s not religious, you sure pray a lot.”

Beatrice is a girl sculpted out of ripped jeans and rock music. She’s dedicated to sticking it to the man and on top of that, not particularly bothered with figuring out which man that is. She’s propped up against one of the wooden pews, casually attitudinal, waiting for Dean to justify herself.

Dean stands. “Religion is about faith,” she explains.

Beatrice raises her eyebrows. “And?”

“It’s not faith if you know someone’s listening.”

* * *

Dean drove aimlessly for days before she reached the convent. She promised Sam she would try – at least _try_ – to get out of hunting, and she thought that here would be as good a place to start as any. Sister Mary was waiting outside the building for her when she pulled up, and the first thing she did was pull Dean into a hug.

“Are you okay?” Sister Mary asked.

 _Yes. No._ “I don’t know.” Then, “I think… I need some help.”

* * *

Dean has a room at the convent, a cramped shoebox with barely enough room for a single bed. No-one apologises for the size or the quality, and she doesn’t complain. It’s not meant to be permanent.

Being here is good. There isn’t any alcohol on the property whatsoever – except for the vodka that Beatrice tried to sneak in a week ago – and there’s a routine for her. She gets up, she gets dressed, and she trudges across town to the local diner where she pulls a four hour shift serving coffee and enduring casual sexual harassment. This probably isn’t what Sammy had in mind when he talked about the Apple Pie Life, or whatever, but it’s a start.

One day, she wakes up to darkness and Beatrice looming over her. Dean reaches for the gun under her pillow before she realises that it’s across the room, at the bottom of her duffle.

Beatrice takes in the action. “You a veteran, or something?” she asks.

Dean groans. She closes her eyes and tries to chase away the last remnants of the nightmare flitting across her eyelids. “Not in the way you mean.”

Beatrice nods. “Okay,” she says. Then, “Who’s Sam?”

Dean goes ramrod stiff. Her head snaps around to focus on Beatrice. “Who the hell told you that name?” she snarls.

“Whoa, whoa, cool your jets,” Beatrice makes a placating gesture with her hands. “You were shouting out for him in your sleep. Or her,” she adds thoughtfully.

The fight drains out of Dean. “He’s—he _was_ my brother.”

“Oh.” There’s a pause. “What about Cas?”

“He—we—” Dean shakes her head. “He’s the one who’s listening.”

“God’s name is Cas?”

Dean chokes. “Cas’d probably take a whole lot of offence at you saying that.”

* * *

“So,” Dean asks as she walks with Sister Mary through the town. “What happened to Robin?”

Sister Mary frowns. “Robin?” she repeats. “Oh, you mean the preacher’s daughter. She left town a few years back – got married, the whole works.” Sister Mary looks at Dean pointedly. “She lives with her wife out of state.”

_Her wife._

Dean smiles. “Good on her.”

* * *

Beatrice is a good kid. A little messed-up, a little misguided, and a lot of work, but she’s worth it. “So, what do you _do_?” she asks, squinting at Dean through the bright sunlight.

Dean, elbow deep in the Impala, looks up briefly. “I’m a waitress.”

“No, I meant, what _did_ you do?” Beatrice presses. “You’re, like, crazy good with cars, but I’m also around ninety per-cent certain that you could kill a man seven different ways without breaking a sweat.”

“Nine, actually,” Dean corrects. “And I was in the family business.”

“So, like the mob?”

Dean snorts. It should probably be funnier, and it would be, if not for the fact that it cuts a bit too close to the truth. “Cars, actually,” she says. “The Winchesters are a family of mechanics.”

“Oh, right, because it was a _car_ that killed your brother.”

Four months ago, Dean would have probably flown off the handle. She’s feeling more sedate now, more able to deal with the crap that Beatrice is determined to dish, so she just inhales sharply. It’s hard not to think of Sam, of hell – how she knows exactly what it must be like, only ten times worse, because he’s trapped in a box with _Lucifer_ – but none of it has anything to do with Beatrice.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Beatrice says, each word sudden and halting. It’s not an apology. Girls like Beatrice don’t apologise; it’s how they survive.

“No,” Dean agrees. “You shouldn’t.” She slams the hood of the Impala shut.

* * *

The second week of the fifth month is the day that Dean finally decides to talk to Sister Mary about—things. She can hear Sammy’s voice in her head, telling her that it’s not healthy to keep it all bottled up and, after all, this whole stupid misadventure is about Sam, so.

She doesn’t tell Sister Mary everything. She won’t do that to her – won’t tear apart her faith for such a selfish reason. But she tells Sister Mary about Sam. Picking him up from college. Jess. Losing him. Losing everything for him. Losing him again.

Sister Mary listens.

She’s good at that, Dean decides. Good at knowing people, knowing what to do.

Afterwards, it’s like the words won’t stop coming. Dean takes Sister Mary back to the start, to the days she still said, “Deanna,” when asked for her name, to anger and resentment and growing up too much too often. She just talks and talks and talks.

“I don’t know if it will help,” Sister Mary says eventually, “but God loves all his children.”

And that’s honestly the funniest thing Dean has heard in her entire life.

* * *

In the end, it goes like this: she prays, and Cas answers.

She’s bent over in church, head down, hands raised and clasped together, and honestly, she feels so very _stupid_ like this. “Castiel,” she says, and the words fail at the back of her throat. “I…”

Deep breath. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she says.

“I miss you.” She inhales again. “I… I need you. Here.”

Dean opens her eyes to an empty church. Right. Of course. She pushes up off the wooden pew and turns to leave and—

Cas is standing behind her. He looks exactly the same as the last time she saw him – “Angels aren’t supposed to want, Deanna.” – with his rumpled trench-coat and terrible posture. His stare is unblinking, solid and blue, fixed on her.

“Deanna,” he says and that’s enough.

Dean throws herself over the wooden pew and into the aisle and she runs. It’s barely five metres in total, but she sprints all of it. She collides with Cas head-on, but he’s immovable, and he catches her.

“Deanna,” he says again, but he sounds wrecked. He holds her in that awkward way of his that suggests he has no clue what to do with her, with one-hundred and sixty pounds of Dean Winchester, but he _holds her._

Later, he will betray her for Crowley. Later, she will wish she had found the last drops of holy oil she had left and set him on fire then and there. Later, she will scream at him until her voice is hoarse. Later, there will be Sam and leviathans and purgatory and Naomi and the tablets, and Dean will wonder why she ever chose freedom when she could have had peace. But Castiel will be there. He’ll always be there.

And he’s here now, and Dean clutches him tighter.

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of things before you click the X on the side of the tab (because let's face it, you are all tab-browsing right now):
> 
> The fact that 'Sister Mary' has the same name as Mary Winchester is, in fact, pure coincidence. I want to try and persuade you all that it was a masterful move on my part to line her up as a mother figure for Dean, but alas, I didn't even realise that they shared a name until I was about to post this. Yes, I am that dense.
> 
> I chose to have Dean not return to Lisa in this fic. It's nothing against Lisa in canon. I'm just really, really new to Supernatural. Like, I've maybe seen a tenth of the aired episodes, if that. I don't even watch them in chronological order. As I was writing this fic, I didn't _know_ anything about her, so, sorry Lisa fans.
> 
> Any other questions, feel free to comment. Apart from that, I hope you enjoyed the fic. Come find me on my tumblr (daswarschonkaputt) where you will see that I am disappointingly boring.


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